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Exopaedia Road Map

Date: 18 March 2010

Author: Manuel Lamiroy

Object: Exopaedia 1.0 – this document discusses the planned changes/additions to be implemented.

Technical Aspects

Thesaurus

At present, the Exopaedia has an alphabetical index, as well as a list of ‘related topics’ attached to each one of the topics.

This offers fairly limited search functionality. A person might be looking for ‘exosociology’ and not find a thing, because the name of the topic in the Exopaedia is ‘exosociobiology’. If several synonyms exist for a term, yet only one is listed, one would have to know in advance which one to look for. Similarly, a person could be looking for ‘Pleaidian’ where the relevant topic in the Exopaedia currently is ‘Pleiades’.

Another way to help people find the relevant information, is to use a taxonomy: somebody looking for ‘exosociobiology’ might not know the term, but could find it listed under the ‘exosciences,’ just as somebody who is looking for information on ‘Pleidians’ might find that the topic currently is listed as ‘Pleiades’ by looking at the ‘Extraterrestrial Civilizations.’

In order to enhance the user-friendliness of the Exopaedia, a thesaurus will be integrated, consisting of a lexicon and taxonomy.

Lexicon

The lexicon consists of an authoritative file (or index), and a synonym ring. The $ \underline{\text{authoritative}} $ file consists of the list of the actual topics as they currently are in the database. In the current setup,

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e.g., that means that ‘exosociobiology’ and ‘Pleiades’ are part of that authoritative file, because that is the name each topic currently uses. The synonym ring lists possible synonyms, antonyms and derivatives, and links them to the relevant topic (in the authoritative file). In the case of ‘exosciobiology’ the terms ‘xenosociology’ and ‘exosociology’ would be part of the synonym ring. Similarly, ‘Pleadian’ could be listed as ‘derivative’ of ‘Pleiades’ in the synonym ring. If relevant, antonyms may be part of the synonym ring, as well.

Both the authoritative file and the synonym ring are merged into the lexicon, which is what the user deals with: one list of terms which lead to the relevant topic in the database.

Taxonomy

A taxonomy basically is a way of organizing concepts / information in a tree structure. To a certain extent, this is already used in the'related topics.' It would make sense, however, to have this structure available independently of the'related topics' for navigational purposes.

The relationships between the topics determine their position in the tree structure: parent, child or sibling. (In concept mapping, the parent / child relationships are often labeled 'greater than' and'smaller than').

Semantic Network

At present the Exopaedia lists ‘related topics’ for each topic, but is not qualify how the topics are related, or what the nature of the relationship is.

At present, e.g., the topic ‘exopolitics’ mentions a number of related topics, which are listed alphabetically. Graphically, this could be represented as follows:

If we start qualifying the relationships between the topics, we may get a different picture that offers us far more information. (See image next page).

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What we have done here is:

• Assigned an 'object type' to each topic (person, organization, concept,...), and

Defined the nature of the relationship between the topics.

All ‘object types’ belonging to the same ‘object type’ get the same graphical representation. Each ‘person,’ e.g., is represented in a yellow oval; ‘concepts’ are shown in rounded rectangles with a blue background, etc.

Object types:

Location

Person

• Civilization / (informal) Group / species

• Organization

• Event (is located in time and space)

Phenomenon

Concept

Project

Content Aspects

New high-priority topics

A number of topics should be included as fast as possible.

People

Authors: more authors have to be added.

• Contactees

• Meier: UPDATE PAGE

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Alex Collier

James Gilliland

Frank Stranges (stranger at the pentagon)

Charles Hall

o Bob Renaud

Daniel Fry (White Sands)

o Adamski

o Van Tassel

Orfeo Angelucci

O Etc.

Phenotypes

It would probably be a good idea to include each one of the phenotypes in the database as well. This could then include graphics, links to civilizations, descriptions even of behavior etc.

Concepts

Contactee

• Abductee

• Encounters

• Close Encounters

• Truth Embargo

• Reptilians

Programmed Life Forms / Engineered Life Forms

Separating topics according to object type

At present, the extraterrestrial civilizations are mainly listed under their location. Information on inhabitants of the Sirius system can be found under the topic 'Sirius', those from the Pleiades under 'Pleiades.' Each of these topics has a section with astronomical information which pertains to the actual star system (or planet or constellation), as well as a section on its inhabitants.

If we implement the proposed introduction of object types, then these topics will have to be split up, and the information on the civilizations will have to be stored as a separate topic, since they are a different object type (i.e. civilization) than the actual star system / planet / constellation (which fall under locations).

Additional information per topic

A number of additional items will be added for each topic, in as far as that hasn't happened yet.

Sources

An overview of (at least some of) the available sources must be included.

Reliability

The reliability of the sources and the information (content validation) must be included as well.

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Phenotypes

For extraterrestrial civilizations, information on phenotypes (i.e. a description of their physical appearance) will be included as well.

Wiki

The wiki will be opened again for contributions. In order to avoid spam, only selected people will be given access.

Images